Quote:
Originally Posted by R Jones
I have had en email with a series of questions about Phorm/Webwise answered (sort of) by a BT manager. My post with the questions (edited for brevity) and the answers is over on BT Beta forums and can be seen without registering.
http://www.beta.bt.com/bta/forums/th...ID=18175#18175
or http://tinyurl.com/4pyqhn
It took quite a bit of effort to get the answers with as much pressure as a mere customer is able to exert, but eventually the system did respond.
I'm not posting them here because it's not really appropriate to quote a BT manager answering questions about the BT Webwise system here on a VM forum, - but I'm sure people here will find the answers interesting. I'd be grateful for any comments you want to make either here or there.
I'll delay making my own comments until I have had some feedback. |
"11) What will happen to the "browsing experience" of a BT customer who adds all the various oix/phorm/webwise domains to his/her HOSTS file, once Webwise/Phorm is in place? Will that "break" my browsing experience?
If a customer who is invited to participate in the trial adds www.webwise.net to their local HOSTS file with the resolved address of 127.0.0.1, they will not be able to browse the Internet on HTTP port 80 on that PC for the period of the trial. This is because access to www.webwise.net is required in order to process the consent status of the user during the trial. Instead, and as per the advice on the www.bt.com/webwise site, the recommended approach for excluding a PC from the Webwise service if the user regularly deletes cookies is to add www.webwise.net to the browser's blocked cookie list. As previously stated, in parallel with the forthcoming trial, we are developing a solution which will manage the choice of users without the use of cookies. We believe this approach is reasonable and is supported by the advice we have received."
Blocking dodgy domains is a reasonable action. The default position on this should be opt-out, so if the question can't be asked, that should be the assumption.
Unless you are prepared to visit a dodgy domain they will break your browser.